By: Lauren 'Budgeford' Salk

This Spring Festival marks the anniversary of my first event! The Hedge Maze last year was my first major piece of content as a designer on LOTRO, and it’s making its first return this spring, along with a few new quests and games as well. I’m very lucky that I get to focus primarily on Festival gameplay – it’s one of the more challenging and entertaining corners of our game.

I wish I could say it gets easier to build this crazy content as I get more experience under my belt, but instead it only gets easier for me to brace myself for all the challenges that inevitably arise during production. Festivals are surprisingly brutal to make! Simple concepts become deceptively complicated as we develop the events, and we find that we have to constantly design around all sorts of obstacles. (More on that soon.)

My role is to come up with the concept for each event and to make the content itself. I implement quests, NPCs, drama, and much of the gameplay. I work very closely with Tim “Raskolnikov” Lang, who comes up with all sorts of genius rewards, effects, skills, and monster behaviors. The engineers also have a lot of input; their invaluable role is to tell me when we’re staggering into crazy-town with our “awesome” ideas. They say, “Sure, you can have your ponies and unicorns…if you want to crash the servers, mess up character data, and freeze clients. In other words, why don’t you see if you can raise a goldfish without killing it? Then we can discuss getting a dog.”